MushRumors The Newsletter of the Northwest Mushroomers Association Volume 19 Issue 1 February - March 2008 Bounty of the 2007 Mushroom Season Heralds in 2008 at the Northwest Mushroomers Annual Survivors Banquet What promises to be one of the best Survivors income generation and a bit of ethnomycology. Banquets yet held by the Northwest Mushroomers A fascinating evening awaits! Association shall ring in what we hope will be one of the best mushroom years ever in the Pacific North- *Directions to Squalicum Yacht west. Following a bountiful fall for many edible Club at the bottom of page 5. species of mushrooms, not to mention the glut of king photo by Daniel Winkler boletes in the high country of our entire area in the still midsummer month of August, we expect to present a cornucopia of gourmet mushroom delights to adorn the serving tables of this years’ event. The banquet will be held, as it was last year, at the beautiful Squalicum Yacht Club, on Saturday, March 15th at 5pm. In addition to the exquisite potluck dinner, featuring everyone’s favorite “secret mushroom recipe”, we will also hold our traditional auction of mushroom-related items. We are very fortunate this year to have a well Mushrooms and ancient relics in Tibet traveled and extraordinary presentation of “Tibet’s Main Mushrooms” brought to us graciously by Daniel In this issue: photo by Daniel Winkler Winkler, who has forayed Fall brings Alba truffles to Pike extensively in Place Market By Kristin Dizon 2 the Asian high country in Mushroom of the Month search of the Cantherellus tubaeformis regions By Buck McAdoo 3 mushrooms, as well as NMA 2008 Calendar of Events researching (so far) By Jack Waytz 6 Mushroom habitats at 23,000 feet many other facets of the Final Foray of 2007 retrospective area’s ecology and agriculture. The program will By Margaret Dilly 7 outline information on the various species of fungi found there, as well as an overview of Tibetan culture, and the importance mushroom collecting to rural in These “evocative, earthy, and sexy” truffles will cost you By Kristin Dizon An article from a November issue of the Seattle Post Intelligencer Northwest Mushroomers Association Officers and If you want to taste the white trufle of Alba, Italy, you’ll need to fork over $4,000 apound. Contact Information That price probably makes it one of the single most expensive food items in Seattle. President: Doug Hooks 360-715-0729 Truffle season recently began, so local purveyors of fine food are or [email protected] getting shipments of the intensely aromatic, earthy fungus. Delaurenti Vice President: Fien Hulscher 360- Specialy Food & Wine (delaurenti.com) at Pike Place Market received 299-8466 or [email protected] its first half-pound batch Tuesday and had sold out by Thursday. Treasurer: Cris Colburn 360-738- Fortunately a second shipment arrived that day. 3067 or [email protected] Co-owner Pat McCarthy said the store has been selling the beloved Secretary, Book Sales and gourmet item since its start in 1946. In the past, the price has topped Membership:Vince Biciunas, 360-671- out at no more than $3,000 a pound. He said the store doesn’t make 1559 or [email protected] much money on the fungus, but carries it for passionate cooks who crave it. Mailing Address: A small truffle NMA of less than an P.O. Box 28581 inch in diameter Bellingham, Wa 98228-0581 sells for between The Northwest Mushroomers Associa- $30 and $50, tion meets at the Bellingham Public McCarthy said. Library, 210 Central Ave., Bellingham, The record- in the Lecture Room, at 7:00 pm on the setting prices this second Thursday of the months April, year are due to a May, and June and September, October, smaller supply and and November. Note: Each year one or the exchange rate. two of these meetings may be moved to “They are very the NW Room of the Fairhaven Public hard to find, Library. We will inform you in advance coupled with the of these changes. Membership dues are euro being so high $15 for individuals and families and the against the dollar, special price of $10 for students. Please it’s just exploded make checks payable to NMA and prices, ‘ McCarthy said. “But it’s a special culinary treat.” forward to: Weather, too, is a factor. Cris Colburn, membership, at the Rei Hanscomb, La Buona Tavola (trufflecafe.com), also in the Pike mailing address above. Place Market, calls herself the truffle queen. She was smitten at first taste. We need a field trip coordinator. “I fell in love”, she said. “They just got under my skin. And I could Could it be you? If so, contact Doug. It’s not resist finding a way to share them with people.” fun, and besides, someone feeds you! Describing the singular flavor of the pungent white truffle is a challenge. Hanscomb calls it, “evocative, earthy, and sexy.” Its flavor MushRumors is published every other shoots straight from the taste buds to the brain, and that distinct taste month (roughly). Deadlines for submis- can be confused with no other. sions are the 15th of odd-numbered Hanscomb’s truffle-hunting sister-in-law lives in Italy and connects months. (Of course, exceptions will be her to suppliers. Hanscomb likely will get some white Alba truffles made in the event of fungal finds of next week and thinks she’ll be able to price them about $3,000 a unusual import!) pound. Editor: Jack Waytz “This is actually shaping up to be the worst year in truffle history. Phone: 360-752-1270 or It was hot and dry over the summer. It stunts the growth of the [email protected] truffles,” she said MushRumors c/o Jack Waytz But a small truffle goes a flavor mile. “The good news is that if its P.O. Box 28581 good quality, you don’t need a lot,” she said. “You can do nice stuff Bellingham, WA 98229 with a half ounce truffle.” www.northwestmushroomers.org Continued on page 6, column 2 2 Mushroom of the Month Cantharellus tubaeformis (Fries ex Fries) By Buck McAdoo Sometimes called the Winter Chanterelle, this essentially edible, thin- fleshed member of the Cantharellaceae can often be found a month after our regular chanterelle has ceased to fruit. Unassuming and often mistaken from the aerial view for just another fiber- head, Cantharellus tubaeformis may possibly be the most controversial mushroom we have yet handled in a newsletter. Not only are there a full range of opinions on the edibility, but the name of the species itself has jumped back and forth like a football on a rugby field. For those of our readers who don’t enjoy the Latin names, ‘Cantharellus’ is Greek for ‘vase’. The name ‘tubaeformis’ is Latin for ‘trumpet’. Thus, the Trumpet Shaped Vase is your best bet for linguistic accuracy. The problem is… the Trumpet Shaped Vase has long been confused with the Funnel Shaped Vase, or Cantharellus infundibuliformis, the Latin name we are most accustomed to associating with this species in our area. For years it has been debated up and down and across two continents whether they are the same species or not. Dr. A.H. Smith separated them by spore print color. The late Dr. Harry Thiers listed the main differences. Cantharellus tubaeformis had white to pale yellow spores, yellow to orange-yellow stems, and yellow-gray to yellow- brown caps. Cantharellus infundibuliformis, on the other hand, had yellow to ochraceous spores, lemon yellow stems, and gray-brown to black-brown caps. Others have described these cap colors as dull orange to orange-brown to tan. There were, in fact, so many different combinations of cap colors to stem colors and eventually even spore colors that Dr. Bigelow and Dr. Ron Petersen came to believe we were all looking at variations of the same species. Dr. Thiers finally agreed, and in his Cantharellaceae of California, which has the most complete description of the species, he listed C. infundibuliformis as a synonym of C. tubaeformis. This is good news for us. It means that we no longer have to tell people at our forays that we can’t put a name to it until we go home and get a spore print. Caps of Cantharellus tubaeformis are 1 ½ - 6 cm. wide, thin-fleshed, at first convex with incurved margins, and then umbilicate to funnel shaped with wavy, irregular margins in age. The surface can be smooth or fibrillose-scaly, the fibrils slightly darker than the base color. The colors vary from tan to orange-brown to dark brown with all sorts of variations in between. To complicate the picture, Von Frieden suggests that caps are hazel-yellow in dry weather becoming dark brown in damp weather. The center of the cap is often perforated, leading directly to the hollow stem. The gills are blunt to ridge-like, yellowish to buff or pale cinnamon at first and then grayish to lilac-gray in age. They are deeply decurrent, usually forked and somewhat intervenose. They have also been described as waxy in appearance, which suggests an affinity with Hygrophorus. The stems are 4-8 cm. long and ½ - 1 cm. thick. They are smooth, tough, often flattened or grooved, and generally hollow. (Kauffman believed that stems of C. infundibuliformis were hollow from the beginning while those of C. tubaeformis were solid at first, becoming hollow in age.) The stem colors range from pale yellow to yellow-orange to even grayish yellow in age. The odor is pleasantly aromatic and the taste bitter to mild.